First opened Sunday, September 30, 2012
源
みなもと
- flat (heiban)
How to read it: a line over a kana means the voice is high there, and ↓ marks where it drops. A kana with no line is low. With no ↓ the pitch stays high to the end and does not drop even on a following particle (が, は).
source, origin
Minamoto is derived from 水 (mi, “water”), な (na, Old Japanese possessive particle) and 元 (moto, “origin, source”).
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: Wiktionary's text for it doesn't give a split that spells the word and joins to its reading, and any other split would be a guess.
Written with 源
In a sentence
その川の源は日本アルプス山中にある。
The river has its origin in the Japan Alps.
この川は長野の山々に源を発している。
This river rises in the mountains in Nagano.
Sentences are from Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR), picked by fixed rules from a dated export and shown unchanged. Nobody has reviewed them one by one.
What Wiktionary says
Quoted line by line from Wiktionary's Etymology section for this reading, taken from one dated dump so it can't change underneath us. Nothing below is paraphrased.
- “Derived from 水 (mi, “water”, combining form); な (na, Old Japanese possessive particle); 元, 本 (moto, “origin, source”).”
- “Vovin believes that the na in the initial mina- element is not a genitive particle, but rather actually meant "water", contending that the mi was instead the honorific prefix 御 (mi-). See also 港 (minato, “sluice; port”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 源 (dump of 2026-09-02), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Reading, meaning and part of speech from JMdict, and kanji readings from KANJIDIC2 (EDRDG).
Other readings of 源 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not みなもと. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
げん
- “From Middle Chinese 源 (MC ngjwon).”
What the labels mean
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.